While there is a great deal of research on the relationship between the environment and disability, there is less research on housing and how it affects the health and participation of people with disabilities. The goal of this project was to develop tools to assess whether or not housing is usable and to facilitate development of a local Home Usability Network to help people solve home usability problems.

Ecology of Rural Disability

People feel like they fit in rural communities based on the values they share with their neighbors and continue to live there despite the challenges associated with having limited resources such as access to public transportation. These challenges can be particularly difficult when a person has a disability. This project will look at the experience of disability in rural communities and its long term impact on individuals. Read more about Ecology of Rural Disability.

Members of the Montana Transition Training, Information and Resource Center (MT-TIRC) Advisory Board, themselves young adults with developmental disabilities, created this brochure to raise awareness of the mental health needs of youth with developmental disabilities and to suggest skills they think are important for mental health professionals to have when working with this population.

"As aggravating as it is to have to search for our keys, the real problem is our fear that we are heading down the "slippery slope" of one of the many types of dementia. Thankfully, this is not commonly the case. However, it is occurring at an alarming rate to our parents, family members, friends and neighbors – and it will include a significant number of those of us reading this article."

Andrew Myers uses circular graphs or “Circos graphs” as a visual tool to highlight relationships derived from large amounts of data from the American Time Use Survey. Circos graphs were initially used in the natural sciences to represent genome sequences, however, their utility for visualizing large data is particularly helpful for representing relationships between time use and transportation use among Americans with mobility impairments.

Andrew, a graduate student in Geography, assists Dr. Craig Ravesloot with this research project. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of having a mobility impairment on the way people use time and transportation. They found that people with mobility impairments spent less time working and more time watching TV. Furthermore, about half of everyone with severe mobility impairments didn’t go anywhere during the day, an issue that makes it difficult for people with mobility impairments to become involved in their communities.